Thursday, September 25, 2008

Doctor's diary

The "Doctor's Diary" linked above is a perfect example of the "Argument form Ignorance." The author, James Lefanu claims that:

it is unreasonable, given the oceans of medical ignorance, to dismiss the experience of those who have benefited from acupuncture or homeopathy simply because we don't know how they work.

Lefanu goes on to list a battery of things he considers unexplained, as if this list somehow justifies an interest in Homeopathy. What he leaves out, the little detail he ignores is that a lot of research has already been done into Homeopathy and all of it has concluded that homeopathy performs no better than placebo. Science has demonstrated that homeopathy is nothing more than wishful thinking. Thee is no medical evidence that it actually works. Questions of HOW it would work IF it actually worked become moot.

It's pretty clear that James Lefanu's knowledge of medicine is pretty outdated. In the same article he claims:

There must be a reason why someone gets any of thousands of diseases in the medical text book - but what it is, we know not.